Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

My Obama Problem

"We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success."

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Obama tipped his hand shortly after taking office, when instead of agressively seeking to go after Wall Street, he built his economic team from the same crew that created and abetted the massive failure in the first place...Geithner, Summers, and Bernanke et. al.,.

I've been saying this for over a year now; Obama had his chance to be the 21st century's version of TR, FDR and/or JFK. However, instead of "welcoming the hatred of the Bankers", he sought their approval. Instead of promising to "Put a man on the moon in ten years", we still have no coherent modern energy policy, nor even a discussion of one, which is just unbelievable given the clusterf--k in the Gulf.

When it comes to standing up to powerful and moneyed interests, Obama just sits down, and is nowhere to be found.

Why? Who the hell knows. Maybe it was because he was abandoned by his father as a boy, and craves the approval of Authority figures. There is certainly no obvious explanation as to why the man who grabbed the nation's attention and spirit during a campaign, has so utterly disappeared during actual governance, given the incredibly difficult, but also opportune circumstances to forge a new direction that the nation begged for, and continues to need.

Sure, health care reform passed, but nothing fundamental was changed about the Health-care model. We are just going to be throwing more money (taxes) at a broken system. At least some people will have access to health care who otherwise wouldn't.

Is that change you can believe in?

And yes, Congress passed a stimulus bill that most economists said was too small (@ 700 Billion) at the time to do the job. And it turns out they were right. All the while he proceeded to completely ignore the fraudulent and criminal activity that almost destroyed the American Economy. But something is better than nothing, right?

Is that change you can believe in?

And now, we will pass financial reform legislation that will do nothing to reverse the massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the top 1% in our country, and does not address the casino culture (zero-sum, no actually it's a negative sum game) that has become our financial industry. Banksters will continue to pocket their bonuses by siphoning hard-earned wealth out of both the private and public sectors.

Is that change you can believe in.

Many didn't want to listen when I started to mention about "my Obama problem" over a year ago.

Well, seems like I'm not the only one with an Obama problem these days.